People with tuberculosis (TB) undergo months of drug treatment before cure. Recent studies suggest that, even after successful treatment, TB patients may not fully clear the bacterium and be at risk for disease recurrence due to reactivation of resident bacilli. In this study, we conducted an analysis of the proteome of ten TB patients at week 1 after initiation of therapy and after twenty-five weeks of therapy, and also in 10 healthy community controls to identify dynamic and stable protein patterns in the lung and blood. We used bronchial alveolar lavage fluid (BALf) and serum from each TB patient at both time points for our analyses and identified 2,060 and 416 proteins in the BALf and serum samples, respectively, from at least 60% of the samples from each group. Six proteins shared significant trends between the two sample types. Data are available via ProteomeXchange PXD073337 for comparative studies and include a unique, paired BALf proteome data set in addition to a paired serum sample set from the same study subjects.
Ramírez et al. (2026) studied this question.